It's been kind of nice seeing everyone, again. I am always surprised at how much I miss everyone at work by the end of the year-end shutdown. It's good to be able to sleep late, catch up on some reading from the accumulated pile, make some plans for the upcoming year and of course spend time with family. But I really have missed the daily give-and-take with coworkers, the last couple of weeks.I always get this little tingle at the start of a new year. It's kind of like that first day of school again, with a new notebook filled with blank pages, a fresh new pen and a whole new attitude with the promise of doing better, this time. This could be the year I make the honor roll!
It also reminds me of my days as a freelance writer. Back then, each new assignment started with a blank word processing document and me staring at the empty screen. Maybe this would be the product review that finally convinced the Pulitzer committee or the Nobel folks that they needed to review computer journalism, too? Starting with a blank page you could imagine the work going anywhere. This might be the review that gets me "discovered" and whisked by private jet to some venture capitalist's hot new tech company. This might be the breakthrough page that earns me the cred to get free computers and software from manufacturers—for review purposes, of course. This might be the piece that snags me a monthly column in one of the shiny, glossy magazines!
Beginnings are like that—the sky is the limit. And then you motor on, doing the best you can, plodding, correcting, amplifying, clarifying, editing, copying and pasting and starting over. But the second word you type is very much dictated by the first, and that third word has to agree with the first two. And so on. At some point as you near the end, you come to realize that this probably isn't going to be The One. In fact, by the time you hammer out those last few words, you realize there isn't any chance that this turdlette is going to win any hearts or minds and maybe the best you can hope for is that they'll still send you a check for it.
At the start, a project can become anything. There is hope and wild optimism and the promise that only the fresh start can bring. But by the end, by the final word, you realize there's nothing you can do at that point to either help or harm the work, much. The best you can do then is to hope for another chance, another assignment. Another rush.
So far this year, I probably haven't screwed anything up. This might be My Year. There is a chance, however remote, that I'll do something worthy of them renaming the building for me. By about June, I will probably be satisfied with just keeping my job, and of course by December I will already be looking forward to coming back in January, with another fresh new start.
I hope, once again, to learn JavaScript this year. I hope to be able to spend more time in the new Adobe CS4 software, learning it's secrets to better work and more productivity. I hope to shine-up all of the training, since it all depends so heavily upon Dreamweaver CS4, to take better advantage of the features in the program. I hope to be able to bring on some new training, too. I have a collection of questions people have asked over the past year and more and some of those answers would make nice workshops. I hope to be able to do a little more work in PHP and MySQL this year. We'll see.
I have a whole bunch of personal resolutions for the year ahead, most of which come down into three camps: ending the year thinner and richer, with less clutter. Right now, though, things look pretty good from here. What do you think?
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